EcoWorldly

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Scientists will tell you that men have a lot to learn from the animal world in as far as the art of sex is concerned.

This fact was reinforced last week with the announcement that ecologists at the University of California, Davis had isolated scent-emitting enzymes that could be manipulated to prevent sexual activity between males and females of the Japanese beetle as a way of checking their population.

Essentially, this means that scent has been confirmed to play a major social-environmental stimuli role for sexual activity in insects and other animals, like the mammals and even human beings.

The importance of smell in relation to sex has been studied for centuries. Books like The Scent of Eros: Mysteries of Odor in Human Sexuality by James V. Kohl and Robert T. Francoeur and The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour by David Michael Stoddart offer great insights into human pheromones, the sense of smell, and human sexual behavior.

The latter work actually examines the sense of smell in humans, comparing it with the known functions of the same sense in other animals, providing details as to how odorous cues play a role in sexual physiology and behavior in animals.

In animals, sex pheromones indicate the availability of the female for breeding. Male animals may also emit pheromones that convey information about their species and genotype. Many insect species release sex pheromones to attract a mate, and many insects like moths, beetles and butterflies can detect a potential mate from as far away as 10 kilometers.

In the case of Japanese beetles and other pest insects, pheromones can be used to induce many behaviors. This facilitates trapping for monitoring purposes and population control by creating confusion, disrupting mating and preventing them from laying eggs.

And that is why the research by the UC Davis team led by Prof Walter Leal offers crucial lessons which could lead to important applications in controlling the invasive pests responsible for US$450 million in agricultural damage annually in the United States alone, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This new research, Science Daily reports, was aimed at exploring new frontiers in pest control. The Leal team have isolated, identified, cloned and expressed a pheromone-degrading enzyme that could be manipulated to keep males from finding and mating with females.

But the idea that chemicals play a key role in sexual communication is not new, according to Paul Aitken writing in AltPenis.com. The term pheromone, from the Greek pherein (meaning to transport) and hormon (meaning to stimulate), was coined in 1959 to describe a molecular attractant discovered in the silkworm.

In insects, the receptors for these chemicals are located throughout the body. In mammals and reptiles, pheromones are detected almost exclusively by the vomeronasal organ (also called Jacobson’s organ) which is located in the nasal cavity. In humans it appears as two depressions, one on each side of the nasal septum.

That human pheromones play a crucial, un-ignorable role in sex has made pharmaceutical companies get on the rush to deliver workable synthetic pheromones. In the year 2000, it was reported that researchers at San Francisco State University had conducted a study that concluded that women who wore a perfume laced with synthetic pheromone had reported a significant increase in socio-sexual behavior, including being approached by men.

One woman actually confessed to having sex for times a week wearing the synthetic pheromone compared with a dull, sex once a week without it. Nature sometimes offers lessons that are worth imitating, like blissful sex aided by the sense of smell.

Image credit: Kaibara87 at Flickr under a Creative Commons license